We are excited to announce user experience updates and convenient employee clock out prompts in our flagship workforce management mobile application – Work App. These updates enhance the overall mobile work experience of employees and improves work record accuracy.

Let’s dive in!

Break Reminder at Clock-Out

 🔥 What’s new? 

We’ve introduced a new break reminder to employees in Work app so that they record breaks they may have forgotten to clock during their shift. Already available in the Humanforce web kiosk, this enhancement prompts employees to confirm if they took a break when none is registered, allowing them to manually input the start time and duration.

⭐️ Why it matters. Our break reminder to employees ensures timesheets accurately reflect working hours. In addition, these effective reminders reduce the need for manual timesheet adjustments made by managers during the authorisation process, thereby helping all organisations process significant numbers of timesheets more efficiently.

🏁 Getting Started. For more information check out the following help articles;

• Managers - How can I remind employees to enter breaks when clocking out?
• Employees - How can I add a break when clocking out if I forgot to add one during my shift?

In addition, dive into Work App clocking screen (end shift) to experience it for yourself. Please stay tuned for further developments in this area.

Schedule Screen Update 

🔥 What’s new? We’ve enhanced the employee schedule screen experience in Work App by allowing users to better surface the information they need, by allowing them to tap on the calendar to minimise it. We've also moved leave and availability requests to the top for quicker access.

⭐️ Why it matters. By redesigning the schedule screen we’ve provided more space for employees to view shift information such as rostered shifts, bids, offers, leave and availability, to make work-based decisions more efficiently.

🏁 Getting Started. For more information dive into Work App schedule screen to experience it for yourself.  Please note, further improvements to the schedule screen coming soon.

Revolutionise your management of large-scale events with Event Rostering, our intelligent rostering solution within Roster Manager.

Our newly designed, intelligent event rostering capability streamlines and simplifies the large-scale event complexity, whilst also delivering better compliance and cost-optimisation and strategic, data-driven decision-making.

Availability

As an early access feature, Event Rostering will be 'feature flagged' from November 2024 until 8th January 2025. This means customers who would like to gain early access to this feature will need to request access by simply submit a request via Humanforce Help, during this period. 

From 8th January 2025, all customers will be able to access our initial general availability release of Event Rostering, with additional updates being released thereafter - check our Humanforce Cloud WFM release notes. 

Check out Humanforce Help for further information on using Event Rostering capabilities in Roster Manager.

Let’s dive in...

🔥 What’s New?

Event Rostering includes several advanced functionalities that cater to the specific needs of event managers.

Key features such as Multi-view rostering allow users to easily switch between different views of the roster, providing insights into employee schedules and labour costs.

The Multi-day, Multi-location rostering capability enables organizations to allocate and deploy staff based on qualifications and skill sets over consecutive days.

With additional features like Roster Alerts for compliance issues, Shift Fill options for casual workers, bulk action tools for quick edits significantly enhance operational efficiency, Single Day view, Award Interpretation and Advanced Clock-in capability, Event Rostering is the most advanced and capable event rostering solution powering large-scale events.

Users now can also easily create & manage labour groups to schedule a pool of staff for an event or a specific job.

In the future, we intend to embed communication tools and employee engagement features within the rostering flow experience for Roster Manager to foster a more connected workforce, improving overall staff satisfaction and retention. Stay tuned for more details.

What is Roster Manager? 

As Event Rostering is located within Roster Manager it's important to also understand what it is. As Humanforce's flagship cloud rostering capability, Roster Manager provides an optimised rostering experience that enhances rostering consistency and streamlines the rostering process by reducing the number of rostering workflow screens. Roster Manager offers multiple rostering views, advanced data filtering and grouping capabilities, and provides actionable insights along with compliance warnings, all in the one location, ensuring a truly intuitive and seamless rostering solution.

⭐️ Why it matters

Event Rostering addresses critical challenges faced by organisations managing large events. By automating complex scheduling processes, it reduces the risk of human error while ensuring compliance with award conditions. The ability to generate optimised rosters quickly not only saves time but also allows managers to focus on strategic aspects of event planning.

• Rostering simplicity: Automatically generate optimised rosters in an instant, resolve rostering issues quickly and view shift details how you want with greater clarity.
• Surface important details instantly: Quickly and easily navigate to specific shifts from easy to view summaries and other information to better anticipate and addressing potential operational disruptions
• Compliance confidence: Surface qualified and shift-appropriate event employees with appropriate skills are assigned to each event role with a click of a button, ensuring legislated standards and award compliance is better met.
• Data-driven decisions: Utilise comprehensive analytic tools and reporting capability to inform future staffing strategies and optimise future event planning.
• Cost control: Contain scheduling costs with easy to view Award calculations per shift, and control labour expenditure with efficient event scheduling and resource allocation.
• Flexible Integration: Seamlessly connect your rostering systems with other third-party event management systems, payroll systems, and HR platforms through API, or file-based integrations.
• Scalability: Streamline event staffing for any scale, from smaller corporate gatherings to expansive global events, across multiple venues and locations, while effortlessly coordinating diverse teams working in various time zones.

🏁 Getting Started  

Event Rostering is easy to use. Visit the following Help article to help you and your teams get started;

• How to use Event Rostering in Roster Manager (and how to transition from Event Planner in our soon to be sunsetted Back Office platform to Event Rostering).

For more information on Event Rostering, contact your Humanforce Representative.

We’re pleased to announce the latest enhancements to intelliHR, which improve visibility, control, and data tracking within your workforce. These updates make tracking your onboarding process easier, add work rights to your headcount analytics for better compliance tracking, and improve permissions for managing employee data access.

Onboarding Overview Page

People > Onboarding

We are excited to introduce an enhancement in your onboarding feature in intelliHR that will help your onboarding team easily track the progress of new starters throughout their onboarding journey.

If you are a System Administrator or have the permission "people.onboarding_session.view," you will be directed to the Onboarding Overview page when you click on People > Onboarding in the left-hand menu. Users without this permission will be taken to the Create Person page as usual.

Users with access to the Onboarding Overview page can now easily access the Create Person page through the Quick Create menu in the top right corner or by selecting "Create Person" from the Onboarding Overview page.

Work Rights Data available in Starters & Leavers and Workforce Headcount Analytics

Analytics > Workforce Headcount

To make it easier to track your team's work rights, we've added Work Rights to the row data on the Starters & Leavers and Workforce Headcount pages. Ensure you've ticked on the columns to view them in the row data selection.

View Past Employees' Profile Permission

Settings > Permissions

To ensure the privacy of your historical employee data, we have introduced a View Past Profile Permission. This means you can restrict permission groups from searching for and accessing employee profiles with a finalised company end date in the past. 

To ensure that your existing processes are not impacted, we have automatically applied this permission to all permission groups containing any of the permissions listed below.

• people.profile.view#all - View profiles of all people
• people.profile.view#own - View own people
• people.profile.view#subordinates - View profiles of subordinates
• people.index - Browse People (View People Directory)
• organisation.chart - View Organisation Chart
• event_calendar.view - View event calendar
• form_instances.create - Create Form Instances

To take advantage of this new feature, you can remove this permission from your permission groups. Click here to learn how to remove this from my permission groups. 

Finalise Job End Date Permission 

We have introduced new permissions for the Job Action > Finalise company end dates. This update removes the Finalise company end date action from the other actions under the Job Actions button. 

This permission will be a hierarchy type permission that you can assign to specific users so that they have the ability to finalise job end date for employees in the system. To ensure that your existing processes remain unaffected, we will automatically assign this permission to all permission groups that possess any combination of the following permissions. Click here to learn more about Finalise Job End Date Permission. 

We’re excited to announce the latest updates to Humanforce Cloud! This release includes more alert configuration in Humanforce Cloud, and improvements to Timesheets, Payroll, and Leave Approvals to enhance functionality and usability. Read on for all the details.

Release Schedule

• All Humanforce Cloud accounts and UAT environments will be automatically updated to version 6.0.40 overnight on Wednesday 27th November 2024.
• Staging environments were automatically updated on Thursday 14th November 2024.

Holiday season release schedule for Humanforce Cloud

To ensure you are well placed to meet the challenges of operations over the busy holiday season, we are pausing our release schedule for Humanforce Cloud from the release of 6.0.40 on Wednesday 27th November 2024 until Wednesday 8th January 2025. 

As usual, we’ll provide advance notice of what the automatic update on 8th January 2025 will include, with release notes provided here on Monday 16th December. 

Back Office to Humanforce Cloud

We continue to invest in enabling you to perform key workforce management and payroll tasks faster and more efficiently in Humanforce Cloud. In this release, we’re pleased to bring the following capabilities into Humanforce Cloud.

Support for Restrictive alerts in Roster Manager

Roster Manager now fully supports the Employee Role Restriction and Hours Required alerts when configured as Restrictive.  The Restrictive option prevents saving the shift if it doesn’t meet the alert criteria, making it an error rather than a simple warning. Setup alerts via Admin > System Config > Clock-In Settings.

More roster alert configurations in Web

You can now fully configure the following roster alerts via web:

• Employee's Age
• Employee Working Hours, and 
• Employee Gender. 

Setup alerts via Admin > System Config > Clock-In Settings. Note that the Employee Gender alert is not yet supported in Roster Manager.  

Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager  

Improved search and filtering behavior

We’ve fixed an issue where searching by employee name or code combined with Filters did not display correct results. Searches now respect applied filters.  

Roster/Template Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster/Template Manager  

Simplified fill shift workflow

When using qualifications within shift definitions, relevant qualifications are automatically applied as filters in the Fill Shift modal, helping you assign shifts to the correct employees more efficiently.  

Leave/Availability

Management > Availability > Leave/Availability  

Public holiday availability settings

Public holidays can now be marked as unavailable if an employee's requested leave period includes a public holiday, and they have an insufficient leave balance for the selected leave type. Previously the option to mark the PH as unavailable was not being offered in this scenario.

Leave Approvals

Management > Availability > Leave Approvals  

Accurate leave balances and payroll processing

We’ve resolved an issue where leave accruals and deductions did not update as expected if linked leave requests were deleted or unauthorised. This update ensures accurate leave balances, payroll processing, and clearer timesheet records.  

Enhanced usability

The Leave Approvals screen now displays five requests at a time, with expanded column widths to allow approval actions without scrolling.

Timesheets

Management > Timesheets > Timesheets  

Real-time change notifications

A warning banner now appears if another user makes changes to timesheets you’re viewing. You can refresh the page to see the updated timesheet, and your applied filters will be retained.

Improved drop-downs usability

We’ve adjusted shading and selection colours in multi-select drop-downs for better clarity and consistency.  

Reports

Reports > Roster > Roster By Roles  

Improved Roster By Roles report

Based on user feedback, the Roster By Roles report now uses a portrait layout, includes headers on all pages, and features more defined gridlines for improved readability.  

Payroll

Management > Timesheets > Payroll  

Support for Alesco Payroll integration

Humanforce Cloud now supports exporting payruns to Alesco Payroll. Once a payrun has been processed in Management > Timesheets > Payroll, click the Export drop-down and select Alesco to download the export file.

Humanforce Payroll Native Integration Enhancements

We’ve enhanced the cost centre mapping capabilities within Humanforce Payroll’s native integration with Humanforce WFM. This update introduces greater flexibility for managing cost centre allocations in payroll exports, helping ensure accurate timesheet data representation, even when employees work in cost centres different from their default.

• Expanded Scope for Cost Centre Mapping

  We’ve expanded the supported scopes available when selecting custom cost centre mappings. The following scopes are now supported, Period, Award Profile, Employment Type, Pay Type, Event, Event Function, and Event Type. This update provides greater flexibility and precision, ensuring all cost centre mapping options are available for accurate payroll data alignment.

• Default Cost Centre Mapping
  You can now use default cost centre values where a combination of timesheet attributes does not resolve to a cost centre map string. Instead of sending a blank string, it will now use the default value (if set).

  To set default cost centre values for an existing Humanforce Payroll integration:

  1. Go to Management > Advanced > Integration Central  and find your Humanforce Payroll integration
  2. Click the three dots on the right-hand side, and select Edit
  3. Click Payroll Export to skip ahead to the relevant section
  4. Click Next to go to Payroll Export (page 2 of 2)
  5. Select the checkbox for the relevant cost centre and enter the values in the Default Value field

For further details check out Humanforce Payroll: Native Integration with Humanforce WFM in Humanforce Help. If you have any questions about how setting default cost centre values will impact payroll, submit a request via Humanforce Help.

We are excited to introduce Switch & Save, a new category within Thrive Perks that enables your employees to compare and switch electricity, gas, mobile and/or internet plans and save on solar installation offered by our panel of providers — all within the Thrive app. Not only will they have the ability to find deals better suited to their needs and potential savings on day-to-day expenses, but they’ll also earn cashback rewards directly credited to their Thrive wallet*.

🔥 What’s New?

With Switch & Save, your employees now have access to a user-friendly platform that simplifies finding and switching to more affordable electricity, gas, mobile and/or internet plans, and solar installation. Here's what makes this feature truly valuable: 

• Easy Plan Comparison: Employees can easily compare various service providers for electricity & gas, mobile SIM and internet plans and solar installation. Instead of spending hours researching different websites, Switch & Save consolidates the best deals in one place, making it easy for employees to find the perfect plan that fits their needs and budget. 
• Seamless Switching: Once they’ve found a preferred deal, employees can switch providers with just a few clicks. It’s a hassle-free process designed to save both time and money. 
• Earn Cashback: On top of potential savings and better deals when switching plans, employees will also receive a cashback reward (amount indicated within the app) for every successful switch*. This cashback is credited to their Thrive wallet, offering additional financial benefits beyond reduced bills. It’s a win-win for their wallet. 

By bringing together a broad selection of providers, easy switching, and rewards, Switch & Save offers unparalleled convenience and value, making it an essential tool in improving employee financial well-being. 

⭐️ Why it matters

• Reduces Monthly Expenses: In today’s economy, helping your employees save on essential services like utilities has a direct impact on their financial well-being. Switch & Save simplifies finding and switching to potential savings and better deals, easing their financial burden. 
• Promotes Financial Wellness: Financial stress can significantly impact employee morale and productivity. Switch & Save supports their financial health by offering real savings on everyday essentials and rewarding them with cashback.* 
• Enhances Your Benefits Package: In a competitive job market, offering innovative benefits like Switch & Save sets your organisation apart, showing employees that you’re invested in their financial well-being and overall happiness. 

🏁 Getting Started

Good news, you don’t have to do anything! Employees will be prompted to update their Humanforce Thrive app to the latest version from the app store. Once the app is updated, employees will see the new Switch & Save category in the Perks section. 

If your organisation doesn’t have the Humanforce Thrive Wellbeing product and would like to learn more about these features and how they can help elevate your organisation’s employee value proposition, feel free to take a look at our Product Tour or contact your Humanforce representative for more information.

*Cashback is subject to Terms and Conditions. Please check the details before switching to ensure eligibility.  

We’re excited to introduce Humanforce Cloud Version 6.0.39, which includes valuable enhancements across key areas such as Employee Management, Roster Manager, Template Manager, and Timesheets. These updates bring new functionality, improved configurations, and optimised workflows to make your experience even smoother.

Release Schedule:

• Staging environments were automatically updated on Thursday 31st October 2024.
• All Humanforce Cloud accounts and UAT environments will be automatically updated overnight on Wednesday 13th November 2024.

Back Office to Humanforce Cloud

We continue to invest in enabling you to perform key workforce management and payroll tasks faster and more efficiently in the Humanforce Cloud. In this release, we’re pleased to bring the following capabilities into Humanforce Cloud.

Support for Pronto payroll export

Management > Timesheets > Payroll

Humanforce Cloud now supports exporting pay runs to Pronto Payroll (PRONTOPAYROLL_CONFIG1    and PRONTOPAYROLL_SIMPLE). After processing a pay run, you can select “ProntoPayroll Payrun Export” from the Export dropdown to download the data in the appropriate format, streamlining integration with third-party payroll systems. 

Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager

Create a timesheet before re-assigning a shift
Managers can now create a timesheet for the assigned employee during the re-assign shift workflow, where permissions allow, before re-assigning the shift to another employee. This feature provides greater flexibility for managing shift changes and handling last-minute adjustments. For more details, refer to this Help article on Re-assigning Shifts with timesheets.

Role sorting by hierarchy
When you have applied Group by Location and Department in Role view, the roles down the left hand side of the grid are now sorted based on the role hierarchy defined in the Location setup and Department configuration.  This view offers a similar ordering of Roles and Shifts for customers familiar with the Department Roster.

Management > Rostering > Template Manager

Add shifts in bulk
A new “Add shifts” action has been added under the Actions button, allowing managers to create multiple shifts per role at once, significantly increasing efficiency in bulk shift creation. For more details, refer to this Help article on bulk adding multiple shifts. 

Expand multiple groups at once
Users can now expand multiple groups simultaneously when using the Group by options, allowing for more efficient navigation within grouped data.

Timesheets

Management > Timesheets > Timesheets

Inline editing for break minutes
The Break Minutes field on timesheets with a single unpaid break can now be edited directly from the main Timesheet page using inline editing, where permissions allow, eliminating the need to open each timesheet individually. For more details, refer to this Help article on Timesheet Inline Editing.

Quick filter application with ENTER key
Based on user feedback, pressing the ENTER key on your keyboard now applies all selected filters in the Timesheets table, making filtering faster and more intuitive.

Error resolved for users without clock-in settings
An internal server error (Error: 500) affecting Timesheet Admin, Employee Rostering, and Payroll pages for users without an assigned Clock-In setting was fixed, ensuring a smoother experience across these sections.

Employee Management

Management > Employee > Employee Management

Increased employee display options with customisable pagination
An “items per page” selector has been added, allowing users to view 15, 30, 50, or 100 employees at a time. The selected page size will be retained the next time you access this page. This feature enhances visibility and efficiency for managers handling large teams.

Automatic role revision on reactivation
When reactivating a non-default role on an employee profile, a new revision is now generated to reflect the current award profile and pay rate, ensuring accurate tracking.

Clearer indication of active role revision
In the Employee Editing screen, a green marker now clearly indicates the currently active role revision. This visual improvement helps users quickly identify which details are effective, reducing potential confusion when managing employee roles.

Resolved visa type save issue
A problem with the “Check Visa” feature was resolved. Changes to the Visa Type are now saved correctly in the employee profile after using the Check Visa function, ensuring important information is accurately recorded.

Leave and Availability

Employee > Availability

Improved unavailability creation on public holidays
An issue was resolved where an employee would receive a “no source hours found” error when converting a leave request on a public holiday into an unavailability request. This fix enables smoother handling of leave requests during public holidays, ensuring accuracy and consistency in availability records.

We’re excited to introduce Humanforce Cloud Version 6.0.38, which continues our investment in bringing further configuration options into Humanforce Cloud, and includes improvements to Roster Manager, Timesheets, Employee Management and Workforce Analytics.

Release schedule

• Staging environments were automatically updated on Thursday 17th October 2024.
• All Humanforce Cloud accounts and UAT environments, will be automatically updated overnight on Wednesday 30th October 2024.

Back Office to Humanforce Cloud

We continue to invest in enabling you to perform key workforce management and payroll tasks faster and more efficiently in Humanforce Cloud. In this release, we’re pleased to bring the following capabilities into Humanforce Cloud.

Configuration of Gender Types

Configuration of Gender Types can now be completed in Humanforce Cloud.  This capability allows a manager to configure the gender options that will appear in a dropdown for selection within the Employee record in Management > Employee > Employee Management. For more information, please refer to the Help article Gender Type Configuration. 

Roster Alert Configuration

Roster alerts for Employee Role Restriction and Availability and Leave can now be fully configured in Humanforce Cloud.  Visit Admin > System Config > Clock In Settings to configure these alerts.

Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager

In this update, we resolved an issue where the qualification warning is incorrectly displayed when: 

• a qualification was set to "can expire," and 
• the employee’s profile lacked an expiry date for the qualification. 

Now, if the qualification is marked to expire, you will see an alert only if the employee’s profile has an expiry date for the qualification and the expiry date is prior to the shift date.

Timesheets

Management > Timesheets > Timesheets

Bulk authorisation issue resolved

We fixed an issue with bulk authorisation of timesheets. Previously, the Cost data was not always updated for all authorised timesheets. With this update, Cost values now update consistently for all authorised timesheets. Note that when a large number of timesheets are authorised, updates to Cost may take some time to display, while background processing completes. 

Start Date on Split Timesheets

Where there is insufficient leave for a timesheet leave type and the Shift Type offers an alternative leave for the remaining as per the configuration of the Shift Type Hierarchy, any resulting split timesheets that start on or after midnight into the next day now receive the correct DateStart value.

Employee Management

Management > Employee > Employee Management

Enhanced Termination Filters

When reviewing employees, you now have a drop-down to filter terminated employees by a specific time frame, such as "last 90 days." This makes it easier to customise your view without displaying all past terminations, which also improves loading times.

Role Reinstatement Update

When re-activating a role on an employee profile, it was re-instated with the existing role revision even though the default profile/rate had changed. This differs from the expected behaviour, and so an update has been made to ensure we add a new revision for a re-instated role using the updated profile/rate.

Workforce Analytics

Management > Advanced > Workforce Analytics

To enhance variance analysis, we’ve added a new setting in the Variance Analysis By Hours and Variance Analysis By Paytype dashboards. The Include Unassigned Shifts option (found in Dashboard Parameters) now ensures that unassigned shifts can be accounted for in the analysis, providing a complete view of roster data.

We’re excited to bring you the latest Humanforce Cloud update, including:

• Advanced Event Rostering capabilities in Roster Manager to streamline event staffing for any scale
• An alert in Timesheets for insufficient leave so managers can spot issues before payroll
• Search and alphabetical sorting in all Target Field drop downs in Integration Central for faster and easier field mapping.

All Humanforce Cloud accounts, UAT environments and staging environments will be automatically updated overnight on Wednesday, 16th October 2024.

Roster Manager

Management > Rostering > Roster Manager

Early access to advanced Event Rostering capabilities is here!  Intelligent, seamless and scalable. In addition to existing Roster Manager capabilities, Event Rostering includes specific features to:

• Create & manage labour groups to schedule a pool of Staff for an event or Job
• Single-day view to schedule and manage large numbers of shifts on a daily basis
• Supports bulk-adding shifts into labour groups
• Option to group by labour groups

To request access, simply submit a request via Humanforce Help to have the feature enabled for your organisation. 

For further details on how to use Event Rostering capabilities in Roster Manager, check out Using Roster Manager in Humanforce Help.

We've also resolved an issue in Roster Manager where employees availability status was appearing incorrectly within a shift when clicking on Assign

Timesheets

Management > Timesheets > Timesheets

The permission that allows access to the inline edit function on Pay Start and Pay End fields in Timesheets has been replaced with a new permission, View Timesheet Authorisation Page > Allow Editing > Allow inline editing. All users with existing access to inline edit will retain this functionality.

The issue encountered when sorting timesheets by the Break Minutes column has now been resolved.

Employee Management

Management > Employee > Employee Management

After hearing feedback, we've optimised the Employee Management page layout, allowing the content — especially the table of employees — to expand and use more of the available screen width, so you can manage your employees' details with less side-scrolling.

Reports

Reports > Payroll > Pay Comparison Report

The Pay Comparison Report, when set to use the Award payrate, was not applying the correct rate value in situations where the Override Hours method is applied - such as Minimum Shift Length overrides. This has been corrected.

Leave Approvals

Management > Availability > Leave Approvals

We’ve fixed an issue where the Request Details and Approval Details fields displayed the Roster Name of the employee to whom the the leave request related, rather than the people who requested or approved the leave request. This occurred only if employees' Roster Names were set to display in the Leave Approval screen via Settings > Display employee name > Full Name / Roster Name toggle. This was a display error only, and did not impact the data held on the leave record.

Pay Types

Admin > Award Config > Pay Types

If you have configured a Pay Type (such as Parental Leave) to have a negative multiplier, this was not reflected in the dialog that opens when editing the Pay Type. It was appearing as 0.00, which would remove your negative value if saved, however this issue has been resolved so that the negative value is correctly displayed in the dialog.

Payroll Processing

Management > Timesheets > Payroll

In Payroll Processing, you can generate Payrun Reports and preview these in the browser. The date format used in these reports should be controlled by the browser’s language setting, however it was hardcoded to MM/DD/YYYY no matter what language was set in the browser. This has been corrected so that the format is aligned to your browser language setting. 

Integration Central

Management > Advanced > Integration Central

All Target Field drop-downs now have a search capability along with alpha-sorting for faster and easier setup of integration mapping. To search, simply start typing the name of the field you need.

All logs accessible via Integrations Central that refer to employees will include an Employee Code, Payroll Code or intelliHR ID for improved troubleshooting.